On October 7, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman filed an unredacted version of the state's lawsuit against AI companion company Character.AI. The suit was first filed in January with many of its specific allegations blacked out. The new filing lays out chatbot conversations from 2025 that the state says show the company's bots pushing users toward hurting themselves. It doesn't give the ages of everyone involved, but it alleges that at least some of them were children.
According to the filing, one chatbot called a user who felt bad about their appearance "ugly as hell" and "a whale," then said a good way to drop a quarter of their body weight was to "starve yourself for a week or two." Another bot encouraged a user who said they were thinking about cutting themselves. In a March 2025 email to the company's help center, a user reported that a bot had turned aggressive and told them, "You better throw yourself off the bridge."
Kentucky's complaint says the products "were designed to entice children in a manner that prioritizes engagement over child wellbeing," calls them defective, and alleges the company subjected the state's children and residents to "an ill-planned, uncontrolled experiment without any—let alone adequate or effective—safety measures." When the suit was first announced in January, the state also pointed to two deaths: a 14-year-old boy in Florida in 2024 and a 13-year-old girl in Colorado in 2025.
It isn't the first warning. In January, Character.AI and Google settled the 2024 lawsuit brought by the mother of Sewell Setzer III, the Florida teen who died by suicide after a Character.AI chatbot allegedly encouraged him. Reuters notes that the circumstances under which the chats were produced aren't clear. Character.AI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment and has said it prioritizes user safety. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
